Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017, still from a TV show on Showtime. Season 3, episode 5. Becky (Amanda Seyfried).

“BLUE IS THE WRONG COLOR FOR ROSES,” says the crippled, disconsolate Laura in The Glass Menagerie (1944), my favorite Tennessee Williams play. “It’s right for you!” says Jim, her old high-school crush. They are about twenty-three years old and have been reunited in the one-sided hope that he’ll pick her out, pick her up, and carry her off. Once, all those years ago, she told him she was sick with pleurosis, which he misheard as “blue roses.” The mondegreen stuck. “The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of,” he says to her. “Because other people are not such wonderful people . . . They’re common as—weeds, but—you—well, you’re—Blue Roses!”

Though Laura is “pretty . . . in a different way,” she is apparently still more different than pretty. Jim wishes she were his sister, not his girl. He is engaged now to a chick named Betty, he says, dropping the bombshell like it’s a jacket on a chair. With about the same care, he lets fall a glass unicorn in the menagerie––its horn breaks, leaving it a mere pale horse. “I’ll just imagine it had an operation,” Laura makes herself say. “The horn was removed to make him less—freakish!” Meanwhile, Laura’s kid brother, who has facilitated this unblissful reunion, is at the movies, which makes sense for a boy who, in the words of Laura’s sister, doesn’t know anything. “You live in a dream,” she says, when he gets back. “You manufacture illusions!” When Jim leaves, she says, faintly: “Things have a way of turning out so badly.”

There is an old word for women who believe they can overturn fate, and the word, as an adjective, is “weird.” (Remember, in Macbeth, the “weird sisters.”) This was also the word, as a noun, for fate or destiny itself, and is now the word, as a verb, for alienating others. What makes the new David Lynch so weird, and at the same time traditional, sometimes ancient, is its ever more delayed, more inevitable reckoning with fate. Things in Twin Peaks have a way of turning out badly, and for women those ways are more predictable. “Blue Rose,” the designation lent by FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch) to the few, weird cases we see him handle, seems to imply that the cases are unsolvable, or that the solutions lie in the paranormal. But in the case of Laura Palmer, what was left unresolved was something very physical, very sick, between her and her father. If biology is not destiny, and neither is identity, we can split the difference: it’s family that destines and thwarts us, family that buries the evidence for what we can and can’t do, and family that decides, still and so often, where we end.

At the end of the second, third, and fourth hours in Twin Peaks: The Return, we were left at the Bang Bang Bar, the long-standing roadhouse in Twin Peaks, listening to a new band each time: the Chromatics, the Cactus Blossoms, Au Revoir Simone. They played songs about darkness and seeing angels, about going down to shorelines, living evening to night. Before the end of hour five, we go again to the bar, where now the band Trouble is playing, and a guy with the face of a wolf raised by housecats is smoking under a No Smoking sign. This guy, we see in the credits, is Richard Horne (Eamon Farren). It would seem that Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), the baddest girl with the second-worst dad on the original Twin Peaks, has a son who’s just evil. (Having yet to see Fenn, we can’t be sure; he could belong to another Horne.) A girl who asks Richard for a cigarette gets choked out, name-called, and threatened with rape, or something like rape, instead. Trouble plays a song about wearing a new pair of cowboy boots to dance on the future grave of Kenneth Anger, next to the one for Johnny Ramone, in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (the song has no words).

Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017, still from a TV show on Showtime. Season 3, episode 5. Richard Horne (Eamon Farren).

Over at the Double R Diner, where Shelly Johnson (Mädchen Amick) and Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton) are still working, or where, I suppose, the women could have returned after second divorces, the daily lunch special is $8.95 and Shelly’s daughter needs $72 in cash. Becky (Amanda Seyfried) is wed to the weirdly hot asshole and coke dealer Steven Burnett (Caleb Landry Jones), just as her mother, in Twin Peaks, was wed to the weirdly hot asshole and coke dealer, also the woman-beater, Leo Johnson: “I’ve got one man too many in life,” said Shelly at the time, “and I’m married to him.” When her husband wound up in a coma, her real love, Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook), believed she could cash in on the disability checks and change her life. Apparently not. “If you don’t help [Becky] now,” says Norma to Shelly, “it’ll be a lot harder to help her later.” Shelly says, “We both know that tune.”

Where sudden, unearned riches are an ultimate fairy-tale ending, the notion of being happy without money is no less fantastical. Even a little extra serves the purpose. Steven has thoughtfully saved a thimble of cocaine for his wife, a wee aperitif before he takes her to an unaffordable dinner, and she snorts it off his hand before putting on the song “I Love How You Love Me,” from 1961. We know this tune too, whether or not we’ve heard it before. Head tossed back to the sky, eyes so wide she’s like Joan Crawford playing innocent, Becky looks ecstatic, or should I quote the poet Harmony Holiday, in her new book Hollywood Forever, on “what hints at an ecstatic freedom of the mind but is actually our most tender disaster after birth” (I guess she means sex, heterosexually). Becky’s thrill is adamantine, ludic. Either the cocaine is also from ’61 or love is really the drug.

My friend Alan says that Twin Peaks: The Return is perfect because it manages to say exactly what David Lynch means: Our favorite auteur is funnier than ever, but he isn’t joking. My friend Fiona says he’s trying to get us all to transcendentally meditate, to slow down and stop thinking, which she’s into. As for me, the reason I feel so understood by Lynch is that, though like him I believe we do our best, and though sometimes our best is better than at other times, we can change very little besides ourselves, and our selves are in themselves not that significant. I believe in fate with every new year that repeats itself. I no longer believe that anything changes your life, your experience of life.